In The News

For POP-UP Duets (fragments of love), Edinburgh-based choreographer Janis Claxton has dreamt up a nifty new genre: a hybrid of flash fiction, pop song and site-specific performance suited to the city, where the spectacle of other people’s inner lives is regularly before us. […]

If, between now and Sunday, you’re crossing one of the plazas at Lincoln Center — exiting a matinee of “My Fair Lady,” say, or a Dance Theater of Harlem show — and you notice some especially bold public displays of affection, don’t be shocked. You’ve likely happened upon a performance of “Pop-Up Duets (fragments of love).”[...]

In the wake of China’s rise as global superpower, the eyes of the world are turning to its cultural scene. After the boom of visual art in the early 2000s, it is now the performing arts’ turn, with international festivals competing to bring home the next big thing. Within this new wave of performances the rarest of birds has been spotted: Chinese contemporary dance [...]

On this week’s podcast, we interview Alison Friedman of Ping Pong Productions, which regularly takes American productions to China. Plus the editors discuss Hedy Weiss, ‘Julius Caesar,’ and the history of theatre architecture [...]

As an Academy Award-winning actor, an Oscar-nominated director and an acclaimed screenwriter with a solo album to his name, Tim Robbins epitomizes the modern Renaissance man. However, as he tells That’s, he feels “most at home” workshopping new pieces with The Actors’ Gang, the theater group he co-founded in California […]

The National Committee on United States-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program (PIP) is designed to nurture a new generation of China specialists who have the interest and potential to play significant roles as public intellectuals. In the tradition of earlier China hands who ventured outside of academia into areas relevant to foreign […]

Check out the full article by the Paulson Institute at this link. When Alison Friedman founded Ping Pong Productions in 2010, her goal was “to bring China and the world together through the performing arts.” After half a decade of touring Chinese performances across the world and bringing global productions […]

Check out the full Arts Intercepts article at this link. Joseph Lam, Director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (CI), climbed a short set of stairs from the house of the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater up to the edge of the stage and immediately noted that […]

Check out the full Guardian article at this link. Against the metronomic ring of the glockenspiel, Fu Liwie and Mao Xue hold hands and lean in. They pace, in flowing costumes, to the sound of Steve Reich’s Drumming, Part Four. A leg lifts; heads roll and sometimes loll, and the […]

Check out the full Sinica article at this link. http://popupchinese.com/data/1452/sinica-leonard-bernstein-and-china.mp3 This week on Sinica, Kaiser Kuo and David Moser are delighted to host Alexander Bernstein, son of Leonard Berstein and director of the Bernstein Family Foundation, who is now in China on part of a cultural tour. Accompanied by Alison […]

Check out the full International Arts Manager blog post at this link. Artists in every country face funding challenges, so what’s unique about China’s situation? One word: change. As China moves from a planned to a market economy, it is converting not just government-run factories to private enterprises, but government-run theatres […]

Check out the full article at Sino-US.com at this link. The office of Ping Pong Productions, a nonprofit producing and consulting organization with a unique mission of “bringing China and the world together through the performing arts”, is located in an apartment building in a quiet neighborhood in East Beijing. […]

Check out the full New York Times article at this link. BEIJING — On the final night recently of the Actors’ Gang production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” here, theatergoers were treated to an unexpected — and rather meta — performance. Stepping in for an ill colleague at the last […]

Check out the full That’s Shanghai article at this link. As his career enters its fourth decade, Tim Robbins has pretty much done it all. He won an Academy Award for his stirring performance in Mystic River, released a solo album four years ago and is about to star alongside […]

Check out the full Wall Street Journal article at this link. Humor doesn’t always get lost in translation. That is what Academy Award-winner and the Actors’ Gang ensemble founder Tim Robbins discovered while directing “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in China. “There’s so much heart in this play,” Mr. Robbins told […]

Check out the full Bachtrack article at this link. Hypnotic, enthralling and undeniably special: bodies ebb and flow with the tide of change in Chinese choreographer Tao Ye’s 4 and 5. These are just two parts in a series of abstract works that “explore the potential of the human body […]

Check out the full CriticalDance article at this link. It’s an auspicious time for Chinese contemporary dance. The community cohesion, instilled through centuries of Confusion attention to order and more recently of Communist conformity, is conspicuous but so too is the emergence of self-expression. The result is highly disciplined bodies […]